By all accounts the move by IBM to enter the cloud market has been slow, which has resulted in the company playing catch-up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others. Once the company realized this was the future, it has spared no expense in acquiring some valuable assets and technologies to provide the best available cloud platform in the market. The latest move the company has made is to launch a pay-as-you-go model to get more customers to adopt its cloud storage solution.
This aggressive pricing structure is designed to get organizations to quickly deploy IBM cloud storage systems. By adopting the IBM XIV storage system with this payment scheme, companies will be able to manage the large amounts of data being generated by the organization so it can be stored quickly and effectively on a high-performance storage system without the usual capital expenditure associated in upfront costs.
According to IBM, the XIV storage systems will only cost companies the fraction of the price when it is installed, but as the system reaches a determined target the customer will be charged for the full balance of the system. At this point they'll receive a second unit for only one dollar in a cycle that keeps continuing the same way by paying for the full balance of subsequent systems when the target is achieved, and paying one dollar for the following system.
By providing this type of payment platform IBM is in essence allowing organizations to grow with the latest cloud storage solution and pay for it when they have the revenue to support the system they have adopted. For established or up-and-coming companies that are providing Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, Storage as a Service and telecommunications solutions, this new platform gives them an opportunity to start providing new services without the risk of upfront costs.
The IBM XIV is designed to provide a solution with extreme ease of use and first-rate data economics delivering performance that is predictable, consistent and highly scalable. Some of the features include:
- AES 256-bit keys; Trusted Computing Group (TCG) storage specification-compliant
- Nondisruptive, hot-encryption of your volumes in minutes
- Optimize your cloud with XIV open standards and integration support including OpenStack, XIV RESTful API, IBM SmartCloud Storage Access and the new IBM Storage Integration Server
- Extend productivity and data protection using IBM Hyper-Scale Consistency to coordinate concurrently consistent snapshots across multiple XIV systems
- Provide linear scaling up to 325 TB per array and IBM Hyper-Scale for extreme operational agility over multiple systems
- Offer high reliability and availability via full redundancy, self healing and unprecedented rebuild speed
- Provide compelling data economics through superb price-performance, low-touch and simplified management, footprint density, power efficiency and all-inclusive software licensing
As the world becomes more connected and large volumes of data are being created, it is essential to implement a platform that is able to use this information efficiently at all times. Managing this amount of data and using the right analytics solutions to extract value from it is what companies must do in order to stay alive in today's as well as tomorrow's business environment.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
